No More Mister Nice Blog

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No More Mister Nice Blog

"Hateful and totalitarian." James Taranto

Monday, October 18, 2021 COLIN POWELL DIDN'T FULLY ABANDON THE GOP UNTIL IT WAS TOO LATEMatt Lewis of the Daily Beast thinks Colin Powell could have saved us from Donald Trump by running for president.
His legacy will have detractors on the right (he was a sellout who endorsed Obama) and the left (he misled us about WMDs), but I cant help thinking what if he had been the future of the Republican Party? ...

This actually could have happened. Fourteen months before the 1996 presidential election, a Time/CNN poll found that If the 1996 presidential election were held today, Colin Powell, running on the GOP ticket, would beat Bill Clinton 46 percent to 38 percent...
I agree that Powell might have won a general election. His problem would have been winning the Republican primaries.
On a range of issues like abortion and affirmative action, Powell was out-of-step with the conservative zeitgeist. Gary Bauer, who was head of the Family Research Council, called him Bill Clinton with ribbons.
He couldn't have won. You had to meet the religious right's litmus tests then, just as you do now, to win the Republican nomination.

Lewis can imagine Powell winning, and thinks he would have avoided the Iraq debacle.
... as paleoconservative writer Jim Antle suggests, the Iraq war would likely not have happened: As commander-in-chief, the decisions would have been his. He would have been less inclined to fall under the sway of Cheney and the neoconservatives, if they occupied prominent roles in his administration at all, Antle writes.

No Iraq war probably means no Obama and no Trump.
That's a huge leap I'm not prepared to make. Not that it matters, because none of this could have happened.

But I wonder whether Powell could have had some impact if he hadn't limited his apostasy to endorsing Democrats for president.

People talk nowadays as if Donald Trump invented Republican extremism, but, as I've pointed out a number of times, it was a matter of concern years before Trump entered politics. Christie Whitman published a book in 2005 called It's My Party Too!, which was described by the publisher this way:
The former New Jersey governor and EPA administrator under George W. Bush presents a detailed and provocative critique of the Republican party's increasingly conservative and extremist views, recommending a moderate, solution-based approach to government that the author believes is more in line with traditional Republican principles.
What if Whitman had been joined by other prominent Republicans, among them Colin Powell, in abandoning the party altogether? Is it possible that the mainstream media and general public would have reckoned with the party's extremism early enough to prevent it from metastasizing uncontrollably?

But that was never going to happen either. Powell endorsed Obama twice, then Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden -- but as Lewis notes, he never stopped saying he was a Republican until his last year.
In 2014, Powell was asked on Meet the Press about his political affiliation. Im still a Republican, he said. And I think the Republican Party needs me more than the Democratic Party needs me.

By 2021, he said that he could no longer call himself a Republican.
By that time, as we now know, he was fighting multiple myeloma and Parkinson's. Before that, he wouldn't budge.

You and I might never forgive Powell for helping to make the Iraq War happen, but he was widely respected. He might have made a difference. He chose not to try.Posted bySteve M.at10:44 PM0commentsREPUBLICAN VOTERS MIGHT SIT OUT FUTURE ELECTIONS, THANKS TO TRUMP? IF ONLY.It should make me happy that Republicans are freaking out -- and snapping at one another -- over Donald Trump's comments about future elections. The New York Times reports:
The G.O.P.s ambitions of ending unified Democratic control in Washington in 2022 are colliding with a considerable force that has the ability to sway tens of millions of votes: former President Donald J. Trumps increasingly vocal demands that members of his party remain in a permanent state of obedience, endorsing his false claims of a stolen election or risking his wrath.

In a series of public appearances and statements over the last week, Mr. Trump has signaled not only that he plans to work against Republicans he deems disloyal, but also that his meritless claims that widespread voter fraud cost him the White House in 2020 will be his litmus test, going so far as to threaten that his voters will sit out future elections.

If we dont solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020, Mr. Trump said in a statement last week, Republicans will not be voting in 22 or 24. Its the single most important thing for Republicans to do.
Mediaite tells me there's data to back up this Republican fear of diminshed turnout:
A stunning New York Times report reveals an alarming possibility that nearly 10 percent of Georgia Republican voters could sit out the 2022 election unless the 2020 general election is audited.
But when you read the relevant passage from the Times story (the same story I've quoted above), you see that there's not much to it:
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia ... has told colleagues that she was surprised by a recent survey of Republican voters in her district, according to one person who spoke with her about it.

The internal survey found that 5 percent of Republican voters said they would sit out the 2022 election if the state of Georgia did not conduct a forensic audit of the 2020 election.... Another 4 percent said they would consider sitting out the election absent an audit.

The possibility that nearly 10 percent of Republicans could sit out any election even one in a solidly red district like the one held by Ms. Taylor Greene was something Republican strategists said they found alarming.
So this is a secondhand account of a statement made by Greene, one of the least trustworthy members of Congress, describing a private poll that Greene claims she's she's seen but that the person speaking to the Times apparently hasn't seen. The poll, if it exists, confirms the "need" for an audit in Georgia, which just so happens to coincide with what Greene wants. Yeah, I'm totally convinced.

But it's now conventional wisdom that Trump's election fraud talk reduces Republican turnout, and probably led Republicans to losses in the two Georgia Senate runoffs in January. But Philip Bump of The Washington Post is right and the conventional wisdom is wrong:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution looked at county-level results and found that turnout declines in January were heavier in some counties that had voted more strongly for Trump in November.

Thats true.... The more supportive a county was of Trump in November 2020, the bigger the downward shift in turnout in January 2021....

But this isnt the whole story. If we look at the shift by county from the 2018 gubernatorial race to the 2021 contest, theres no such pattern. In other words, the increase in votes cast in the runoff election was pretty uniformly distributed relative to 2018 vote....

It wasnt the 2021 election that was exceptional, it was the 2020 one. And the differentiating factor was whether Trump was on the ballot.
In other words, if you compare the 2021 runoff to the last statewide Georgia election in which Trump wasn't on the ballot, the difference in vote totals is roughly the same in Democratic and Republican counties. The runoff just seems bad for Republicans relative to the 2020 presidential election because in 2020 Trump was on the ballot, and there are a lot of people who don't vote very often but are eager to vote if they can vote for Trump.

But I wish I knew how this misunderstanding could work to Democrats' advantage. I admit that it's fun to watch scared Republicans trying to find someone who'll agree to take incoming from Trump. Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy apparently drew the short straw and was assigned this mission:
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) told Axios on HBO hes not sure former President Donald Trump would win the Republican nomination if he ran in 2024 a rare voice of criticism from within the party.

When I raised the conventional wisdom that Trump would be expected to win the nomination, Cassidy jumped in.

I don't know that, the senator said during our interview in Chalmette, La.

... Trump is the first president in the Republican side at least to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in four years. Elections are about winning," Cassidy said.

On the possibility of Trump losing the nomination, Cassidy said: Well, if you want to win the presidency and hopefully that's what voters are thinking about I think he might.
But Cassidy just won reelection in 2020. He's safe until 2026. Trump will snipe at him, Trump allies will snipe at him ... and in upcoming elections Republican voters will still vote Republican, because they think Joe Biden is in an advanced state of dementia and is also, somehow, the worst dictator since Stalin, because Nancy Pelosi is the Antichrist, and because Anthony Fauci and George Soros and Bill Gates and the global Deep State and Antifa and Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory and the Transgender Menace must be stopped at all costs.

We continue to be told that Trump is a drag on poor Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. From the Times story:
Mr. Trumps recent interference in the Virginia contest where polls show the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, narrowly trailing his Democratic rival, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe worried advisers to Mr. Youngkins campaign. They watched as their carefully scripted plan to keep the race focused on their candidate and on claims that Democrats have veered too far left became engulfed by news coverage of the former president praising Mr. Youngkin at a political rally last week.

Some Republicans said they feared they were watching a preview of the awkward and unpleasant dilemma their candidates would face for the foreseeable future, as Mr. Trump remains the most popular figure in their party, determining what candidates say and how voters think.

Here is where Trump is so destructive, said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican member of Congress who lost her seat in suburban Virginia in 2018. That year, voters in swing districts across the country turned against centrist incumbents like her in a repudiation of Mr. Trump.
But if Trump is hurting Youngkin so much, why is Youngkin trailing in the polls by only 2.2 points, in a state Biden won by 10? It seems to me that Youngkin is doing the rope-a-dope perfectly -- telling media outlets consumed by suburban voters that he's not like that awful Trump, while using Trump and Trump surrogates to rally the Trumpist faithful. (I still think he'll lose, but not by much.)

I'd be thrilled if Trump were a drag on fellow Republicans, but I see no evidence of that.Posted bySteve M.at10:56 AM0comments Sunday, October 17, 2021 DEMOCRATS DON'T COUNTGOP governors who oppose public health are slipping in the polls -- but it's not a problem, according to Politico, because they're slipping with the wrong people.
Republican governors crusading against vaccine mandates are facing significantly lower approval ratings on their handling of the coronavirus pandemic than their counterparts. But theyre not worried.

... Just last week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott flat-out banned vaccine requirements, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis followed up by vowing to sue the Biden administration.

But new research shows governors in states without vaccine mandates or where theyve outright prohibited such a requirement have significantly lower approval ratings for their handling of Covid-19.

In states with vaccine mandates, 52 percent of people approve or strongly approve of their governors handling of the pandemic, according to the latest survey from the Covid States Project.... That coronavirus approval rating drops to 42 percent for governors in states with no vaccine requirements. And it takes yet another hit dropping to just 36 percent in states where governors have barred vaccine mandates.
So why aren't DeSantis and Abbott worried?
... theres the political calculus. Several Republican governors, including Abbott in Texas, are facing primary challenges from their right. Some, like DeSantis in Florida ... have eyes on 2024. Both of those factors are sending GOP governors scrambling to shore up support among the partys base.
This is written as if all that matters is whether Republican governors please Republican voters. The fact that both governors will also face general election voters in 2022, in purple states -- and DeSantis might face them nationwide in 2024 -- is apparently irrelevant. Who cares what Democratic and independent voters think?

This is the same Politico story that features the following sentence:
Vaccine mandates are politically divisive but nationally have broad support.
If they "have broad support," how can they be "politically divisive"? Oh, right -- it'd because the one group that vehemently opposes them is the party of real Americans.
The Morning Consult/POLITICO poll from August showed eight in 10 Democrats and at least half of independent voters want to require vaccinations for all Americans.
But Republicans don't like mandates, so mandates are "divisve." Right. Got it.Posted bySteve M.at1:45 PM0comments Saturday, October 16, 2021 AN EXPERT ON CONSPIRACIES TELLS ME NOT TO WORRY. I'M WORRIED.I'm supposed to be reassured by this Rolling Stone interview with conspiracy expert Joseph Uscinski. I'm not reassured, even though Uscinski's expertise comes highly recommended.
Joe knows this stuff better than really anyone else does, says Ethan Zuckerman, the former director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and a current professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts. Joe has the data and Joes data is good. The rest of us are just dabbling. So Im never going to contradict Joe on what conspiracy theories are and how they happen.
Uscinski insists that there's no increase in conspiratorial thinking these days, and that the people who are falling for the worst conspiracies are people who were already psychologically unstable.
As Uscinskis research bears out, a certain percentage of people (he puts it at 5-7 percent) will be predisposed to believe a certain type of anti-establishment conspiracy theory, and when they go looking, they will find it every time, in whatever form it is currently lurking. And ultimately, that means that in our collective hysteria over the QAnon phenomenon, weve gotten caught up in the weirdness of the ideas while perhaps losing sight of the weirdness of the people and the fact that this potentially explosive weirdness has been an undercurrent of American society all along.
If you believe in extreme conspiracies, Uscinski says, it's because you were nuts to begin with. Here's a quote from the interview:
I mean, theres this style of reporting thats been out for a while, like, My cousin became a QAnon and now I dont know what to do. These articles always start off with: My cousin used to be so normal. Whats really going on is the cousin was never normal or you just didnt pay attention to the cousin and he was probably weird but you didnt have a word to put on that.

But then you hear QAnon in the news. Now you can categorize what your cousin is doing as something. Youre like, Oh, my God, this thing just happened to him. Well, no, it didnt just happen. Your cousin was always a wackadoo. Im sorry....

You know, theres always anecdotes of these things, but when you read the write up of these, youre not getting this full picture of whatever that person might have been into before or what their other issues might be. I mean, there was a write-up last summer about this woman who trashed the mask aisle at Target, and all theyre talking about is social media, conspiracy theories, how conspiracy theories overtook her life. You have to get to paragraph 15 to find out that, oh, by the way, shes diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder, was off her meds for a few months, had lost her job, was facing severe anxiety and was suffering from isolation due to the pandemic. Well, OK, that should be paragraph one.
Uscinski may have data to back this up, but he doesn't show his work. Maybe it's because Rolling Stone is the wrong venue for that. But I would have liked to see some supporting evidence.

Uscinski insists that people believe crazy things because they want to.
What does engaging in a conspiracy theory do for someone who has that mindset? Are they getting constant dopamine hits of their worldview being validated? Whats in it for them?
Theres some discussion that perhaps these are coping mechanisms, but bad ones. Imagine you want to cope with uncertainty. You say, Oh, I dont know why the pandemic happens. I cant sleep at night. So Ill decide that its China trying to kill us all. Well, that might ease your uncertainty, but knowing people are trying to kill you with bioweapons does not really ease your anxiety. I think its a lot more simple than that its that people like ideas that match what they already believe.
But there's a problem here: Believing that the COVID virus is a Chinese bioweapon isn't an off-the-rails conspiracy theory -- it's very close to what many Very Serious People want us all to believe. We've been hectored for months about the lab-leak theory. The belief that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan and that scientists, in China and elsewhere, conspired to cover up the leak is utterly mainstream. Lab-leak believers may not be willing to say that virus was created as a bioweapon, but many believe it was created, as part of "gain of function" research to see what a really bad virus might do, and from there it's a short step to the bioweapon theory. Are all the journalists who believe in the lab-leak theory mentally ill? Morris never asks Uscinski that.

The interview continues:
But the algorithm certainly isnt helping with that.
I think thats getting overestimated, because what do algorithms do?

Give you what you already want.
Right. And nobody wants to really come to grips with the fact that people already want this.
If everyone who succumbs in this way was destined to do so sooner or later, why did my parents smoke cigarettes for decades (in my mother's case, sixty years) while I've never become addicted to them? My answer is that I never started to smoke in the first place. I'm sure I could have easily become an addict if I'd started to smoke, just the way my parents did. Following Uscinski's logic, if I'd been susceptible to tobacco, I would have gravitated toward it. But that's not how people operate. Being susceptible to a toxic substance isn't the same as inevitably succumbing to it. It has to grab hold of you first.

Uscinski may be right when he says that the percentage of conspiratorialists rarely changes. In that respect, maybe there's nothing new about belief in QAnon. What's new is that the belief is weaponized by one political party -- as Uscinski acknowledges, almost as an afterthought, at the very end of the interview.
Leaders will use conspiracy theories from time to time whenever it suits them. Normal mainstream presidents and presidential candidates tend to eschew it. Not entirely, but they tend to not use them....

But having a major presidential candidate like Trump doing it is sort of a new thing. And it wasnt just about one theory or one thing. It was an attempt to essentially build a new coalition within the party. Nobody in recent history has done what Trump has done and has gotten as far as he has. And I think the danger here is when our political leaders start using this stuff to build political coalitions and then to guide policy....

So we have the behavior of our political leaders bringing into our mainstream politics a bunch of people who have anti-establishment views and engage in anti-social behaviors. I mean, we can call it QAnon you can call it whatever you want. But what you have there is a bunch of people with unsavory psychological characteristics and unsavory worldviews being activated by unscrupulous politicians. What the Trump presidency showed us is that our system is clearly vulnerable to that. That does keep me up at night.
Yes, that's the problem. Also, although Uscinski won't acknowledge it, Trump and other Republicans don't merely bring conspiratorialists into the fold, they spread conspiratorialism far and wide, and many people who don't believe every aspect of the conspiracies now say, Elitist liberal pedophiles run the world, and one of those pedophile elitists is Bill Gates, who's using COVID vaccines to depopulate the earth, and in the meantime the 2020 election was stolen by means of satellite skulduggery from Italy and fake ballots printed on bamboo paper in China. Not everyone believes every conspiracy theory. Many of them don't believe JFK Jr. is alive and will be Trump's running mate in 2024. But maybe they believe Joe Biden is completely senile and the government is secretly being run by Barack Obama. Or maybe they just believe Democrats cheat in every election, which is something they've been told by most Republican politicians and Fox News for nearly two decades.

What's the solution? Uscinski says:
Well, I think there are things that could be done. One, the parties need to have better control over who they allow to run under their banner. The Republican Party should not be allowing the Trumps, and the Democratic Party should not be allowing Maryanne Williamson. If people are espousing unacceptable ideas, those people should be removed from the ballots.

Congress also needs to hold their members accountable for engaging in this sort of stuff. [Ted] Cruz and [Josh] Hawley should have been booted from the Senate for their actions. Replace them with another Republican thats fine. They need to hold themselves accountable before they start to censor any of us.
Oh, is that all? I'm sure that should be easy to accomplish. The GOP won't have a problem with it, right?

Uscinski might know his stuff, but he really doesn't understand how conspiratorialism is operating in American politics today. Posted bySteve M.at2:34 PM0comments Friday, October 15, 2021 KYRSTEN SINEMA: FIGHTING TOXICITY WITH ... TOXICITYMichelle Cottle of The New York Times thinks it might make sense for Kyrsten Sinema to become an independent.
Some have suggested that shes charting a path out of office entirely. But Ms. Sinemas better course may be not to leave the Senate but to split with her party. Her departure might even wind up being a positive for all involved.

Throwing in with Republicans seems like a bridge too far. Its not as though Ms. Sinema is an actual conservative. But easing over into the independent column could be a gentler, less disruptive transition. She could still caucus with the Democrats, much like her independent colleagues Angus King and Bernie Sanders.
Except that King and Sanders actually support the current Democratic president's most important legislation.
A split still wouldnt be easy. The logistics would be a nightmare.... But Ms. Sinema has a better shot than most at not just surviving such a shift, but becoming a truly independent force to be reckoned with maybe even a power broker for years to come.
In order words, a thrift-store-chic boot in the Democrats' face forever.

Cottle insists that Sinema isn't an inscrutable flibbertigibbet -- she's a woman of principle! Just read her memoir!
... many of her critics ... see her as a chameleon, unprincipled and narcissistic, an intellectual lightweight without any steady, guiding tenets. But she does have a guiding principle. She holds fast to an abhorrence of the toxicity and dysfunction of the hyper-polarized political system, brandishing a potent combination of disgust, frustration and moderation that could, come to think of it, put her in sync with a big slice of Americans.
So Sinema abhors political toxicity? Tell us more.
... her involvement with progressive activists both as one herself and later as an elected official left some scars. In her 2009 book, Unite and Conquer, Ms. Sinema emerges as a progressive disillusioned by the foibles and limitations of progressive activism. The book, on coalition building, is awash in mocking caricatures of progressives as smug, ineffectual, rigid, self-serious, wonky, disorganized know-it-alls. Recalling her own experiences, she tosses out tough-love observations such as, Progressives love to talk about coalitions, but were not very good at creating or maintaining them, and since were so smart and have all the answers to the worlds problems, youd think that we progressives would get more done.

... With their fanatical obsession with victimhood, she declares, progressives will always struggle to create effective coalitions. This focus on differences rather than shared interests is one of the political tendencies she sees herself fighting against.

That rejection of factionalism may be more central to her identity than any of her legislative positions.
But this isn't a "rejection of factionalism." If you declare that all of your ostensible allies are terrible, self-righteous absolutists while you're The One True Political Force To Be Reckoned With, you've made yourself into a faction -- a faction of one, perhaps, but a faction nonetheless. If you reject the "toxicity" of what you regard as absolutism, shouldn't you demonstrate that by not being an absolutist yourself? Remember, you don't have to be all the way to the left or right to be a politcal absolutist. You can -- to take a purely hypothetical example -- be a person who refuses to negotiate in good faith when the legislation that's the highest priority for all the other members of the party to which you nominally belong hangs in the balance.

This seems obvious, but it's invisible to Cottle. Over and over again she describes Sinema as the person who plays well with others while everyone else is rigid and doctrinaire.
The senator, who declined interview requests, fancies herself a role model for a new ethos favoring a higher road of engagement that focuses on finding common ground, as she put it in Unite and Conquer.
So how about "finding common ground" with the members of your own damn party?

Cottle believes Sinema is a great compromiser even as Sinema wakes up every day and spits in the eye of everyone who begs her to explain what compromises she's seeking. You write a piece like this when you've internalized the widely held notion that the highest virtue in politics, short of being a right-winger, is making concessions with right-wingers -- the very thing Sinema prides herself on -- while no one ever needs to the same with Democrats, because Democrats are icky and disgusting. Posted bySteve M.at5:09 PM0commentsFOX COMMENTERS' RESPONSE TO BILL CLINTON'S HOSPITALIZATION IS PRETTY MUCH WHAT YOU'D EXPECT
I don't consider this a major story, but it's the lead story at FoxNews.com right now:



Former President Bill Clinton remained in a California hospital early Friday after being admitted earlier in the week for a non-COVID-19-related infection.

"On Tuesday evening, President Clinton was admitted to UCI Medical Center to receive treatment for a non-Covid-related infection," Clinton's spokesman, Angel Urena, said in a statement on Thursday evening.
CNN reports that the former president, who is 75, has a urinary tract infection that spread to his bloodstream, a fairly common medical condition in the elderly.

It's a relatively minor medical problem, so why is the story so prominent at Fox? Because it's an excellent opportunity for Fox fans to demonstrate the kind of high-minded civic engagement they're known for. From the comments:
A source close to the situation told Fox News the former president was "diagnosed as a urological infection which morphed into a broader infection

Probably systemic syphillis

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bill remembers trying to grope mooch obama, and then he woke up in the hospital

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I'm sure it is an STD he caught from Epstein Island. I wonder if Hillary brought the painting of him in the blue dress from Epstein's living room to comfort him in the dire time.

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Not Covid-19 related? I thought that since Covid-19 appeared all other illnesses disappeared.

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Bill was diagnosed with an STD accompanied by extreme flatulence. In medical terms, gonorrhea with the wind! Lets go Brandon

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A long very painful illness is exactly what Klinton deserves

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Not Covid-19 related for ol' dirtbag bill means: his herpes flared up just as the claps acted up and spurred his ghonerea into full beast mode until his syphilis came on full motion and swolled up his balls into grapefruits. A hospital trip was warranted, besides with bill being buddies with ol' bill gates, he can't ley anybody know he has the virus with the vaccine in his creepy filthy body.

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Where I live a friend died in a motorcycle accident when his wife got his death certificate the cause of death said he died of Covid 19.

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Bad reaction to the vaccine

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At this moment Chuck and Nancy are secretly hoping Bill meets his maker so they can have a week long funeral complete with a 'Golden Casket' to further distract the American people from their atrocities. FACT.

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Dont Worry. Syphilis is very treatable these days. The hard part will be notifying ALL the contacts.

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Yea would you want to give Hillary the news?

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Hillary won't be on that list, he won't touch that cow

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Has anyone contacted Barry?

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Hopefully he will go slowly, with excruciating pain and agony

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with pieces dropping off

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oscar meyer first

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and poop all over

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What would really be great is if all his nurses were guys who identify as girls

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I bet he asked for Ivermectin
Every so often, this notice appears:
This comment violated our policy.
Which means that all the comments above (and many more like them) didn't violate Fox's "policy," whatever it is.

And please remember: All of these people vote.Posted bySteve M.at9:13 AM0comments Thursday, October 14, 2021 TRUMP HASN'T STARTING INSULTING RIVALS YETI've seen this theory of 2024 emerging in the America media, and now a British Twitter friend has sent me a BBC story repeating the theory:
Is Trump's power over Republicans starting to slip?

... If Trump is dipping his toe once more into presidential politics, the prospect hasn't been universally welcomed outside the friendly confines of his rallies.

A recent Pew Research poll found that, while two-thirds of Republicans in the US want Trump to remain a "major political figure", fewer than half want him to seek the Republican presidential nomination a third time.

It's what the New York Time's Jonathan Martin has called the "gold watch" constituency - a portion of the party that wants to thank Trump for his service and then usher him into retirement with a shiny gift and a pat on the back.
In the Pew survey, 44% of Republicans and Republican leaners say they want Trump to run, while 22% say he "should support another presidential candidate who shares his views." In the latest Morning Consult poll of the primary field, 47% of Republicans support Trump, 12% each support Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis, 6% support Donald Trump Jr., and no one else gets above 3%.

That alone should be enough for an easy Trump victory. But what if he fades a bit more? And what if Republicans who want to move on from Trump clear the field for one strong challenger? If he's only polling in the 40s, isn't he beatable?

Perhaps -- but please note that these are his numbers before he starts insulting challengers.

If there's a competitive primary, Trump will resort to his most dangerous weapon: schoolyard nicknames. Is Governor DeSantis a serious threat? Overnight he'll become ... Rotten Ron! Can't you hear Trump saying that? Can't you picture the campaign press releases referring to DeSantis as Rotten Ron? (Trump's will probably still be peeved that DeSantis rejected the call for an audit of the 2020 election in Florida, even though Trump won.)

Imagine that Nikki Haley is making a serious run at Trump. Trump will undoubtedly begin referring to her using her real first name -- Nimrata -- and maybe she'll be become Nutso Nimrata. (I don't know why any adult would respond well to these infantile insults, but they seem to have an extraordinary power over right-wing voters.)

If Haley is a top challenger, I assume Trump will attack her for one of her proudest achievements: removing the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds in South Carolina when she was governor. And he'll pay no price for that.

Remember, Trump seemed not to have the support of the majority of GOP voters in 2016, and it was widely believed that he'd be beatable once the primary field narrowed. But as it did, he really started dishing out the insults. Li'l Marco! Lyin' Ted! GOP primary voters were having the time of their lives. He won easily. And he'll do it again.Posted bySteve M.at7:32 PM0commentsSINEMA CLEARLY WANTS TO RUN AGAIN, BUT ON WHICH BALLOT LINE?It was only a couple of weeks ago that National Journal's Josh Kraushaar was touting a poll showing Kyrsten Sinema with higher approval ratings in Arizona than Mark Kelly, the state's other senator, who's a much more mainstream Democrat.



Around the same time, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo described Sinema as doomed to lose a 2024 primary -- but then he posted a reply from an Arizona reader arguing that Sinema's plan is to beat any Democratic challengers by drawing a large number of independent voters (who can vote in party primaries in Arizona), at which point she'll have a good shot at winning the general election.

But a new poll from Data for Progress suggests that she's unlikely to survive a primary.
Seventy percent of prospective 2024 primary voters have a negative opinion of Sinema, with just 24% expressing a positive view of the first-term senator. Nearly half have a very unfavorable opinion. For contrast, 85% of primary voters have a favorable opinion of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), who is also in his first term.

The survey tested Sinema against four different potential primary challengers: Rep. Ruben Gallego, an Iraq War veteran who represents Phoenix and whose name often comes up in conversations about potential threats to Sinema; Rep. Greg Stanton, a former mayor of Phoenix; Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego; and Tucson Mayor Regina Romero.

If all four candidates ran an unlikely scenario for many reasons, including the fact that Ruben and Kate Gallego used to be married to each other the survey has Ruben Gallego earning 23% of the vote to Sinemas 19% and Stantons 13%. Both Romero and Kate Gallego would theoretically earn 9% of the vote.

But head-to-head matchups drive home how dire Sinemas position could be. All four potential challengers have massive leads: Ruben Gallego leads Sinema 62% to 23%; Kate Gallego has a 60% to 25% edge; Stanton leads 59% to 24%; and Romero leads 55% to 26%.
And no, she's not doing well among independents in this poll, or at least among independents who are likely to vote in the Democratic primary -- with that group, she's at 37% approval, 58% disapproval.

It's early, and she can theoretically turn this around. But it seems obvious that her corporate owners have tasked her with killing the Biden agenda, not merely watering it down. The earlier poll quoted by Kraushaar might not have been an extreme outlier -- there could have been many Arizona voters who thought it was good to negotiate the contents of this legislation from the center. But voters eventually want legislators to do something, and it's clear that Sinema wants the opposite. If she doesn't find a way to vote for this -- and I don't think she will -- she's doomed as a Democrat.

She clearly doesn't believe that -- she's in Europe now trying to raise campaign cash from Americans living abroad, according to The New York Times, although it's not clear whether she's raising cash for Senate Democrats as a group or for herself.

She can't be gearing up to run in the Republican primary, can she? Last month, Josh Marshall took a look at a Bendixen d built a constituency of partisan Republicans who really like her because shes constantly wrongfooting her own party.And that was in June. Now it's clear that she's sent the Biden agenda to the intensive care unit, where it might not pull through. She might actually kill the bill all by herself, doing that thumbs-down thing she stole from John McCain, with the curtsy added just to twist the knife.

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